After posting my previous entry, 'Stupid and Stupider', I went to the book I am currently reading (The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future - Thomas Berry 1999) and within a couple of pages, ran straight into one of the author's explanations for the diminishing consciousness prevalent in our industrial world:
"In every phase of our imaginative, aesthetic, and emotional lives we are profoundly dependent on this larger context of the surrounding world. There is no inner life without outer experience. The tragedy in the elimination of the primordial forests is not the economic but the soul-loss that is involved. For we are depriving our imagination, our emotions, and even our intellect of that overwhelming experience communicated by the wilderness. For children to live only in contact with concrete and steel and wires and wheels and machines and computers and plastics, to seldom experience any primordial reality or even see the stars at night, is a soul deprivation that diminishes the deepest of their human experiences."
It is no wonder that our kids' collective consciousness is less than complete, growing up as they do out of touch with nature, with humans other than their group of electronic 'Facebook Friends', with the Earth, the Universe and especially out of touch with reality. We have spawned an industrialized world of 8 year-old Barbies and 10 year-old Bart Simpsons and, as they age without maturing, we wring our hands in distress over their inability to function.
Take a look at this story about Barbie getting functional knees for the first time at age 53 - could this be a sign of progress? Bart is still a long way from World Leader material but he is only 24 so there may still be time for some improvement. in the meantime, keep trying to get the kids into some kind of contact with reality and . . . . . Good luck.
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